Metaphors
by Sisiphus
Summary: When Jess was seven he almost drowned in a public swimming pool. Jess centric with implied Lit. angst.


Author's Note: This is the first piece of fan fiction I've ever written. Feedback of any sort is therefore much wanted. This story may become the first in a very small series, but I'm not sure yet.

Disclaimer:I own nothing. As you may have guessed.

When Jess was seven he almost drowned in a public swimming pool. Liz had taken him there as a treat even though he hardly knew how to swim, and he had jumped into the deep end while she was trying to get a date and a tan in the summer sun.

_(When, many years later, Jess has fallen into petty crime and drugs, she is pale and tinged grey. Too many years spent chasing happiness in darkened bars that the sun never touches.)_

Eventually, a high school swim coach with a slight Southern drawl dived in and saved him. He was fully dressed and Jess remembers watching his discarded clip board, the ink slowly running, float across the surface of the pool. The coach kneels in front of him, wrapping Jess in a towel, as his small body coughs up water, and asks if he's alright.

_(Luke gives him a bed and a job and a push off a bridge and a ladle to fight a swan. Luke sacrifices time and money and his friendship with Lorelai. And Jess is saved twice.)_

He doesn't remember panicking or trying to swim to the top of the water. But he does remember the silence and how calm world looked like from the bottom of the pool.

_(Rory has the bluest eyes he has ever seen. She looks up at him and everything is clear and calm and soundless. Everything is made perfect. He thinks this when he first sees her. He thinks it when she is sitting next to him in her car, dripping ice cream on her lap. He thinks it when she is laid out under him on Luke's couch. But he doesn't know it until her scared eyes look into his at a party. And he doesn't hate it until she is looking over at him as she gets off a grey bus._

_He doesn't fear it until she is surrounded by boxes and almost in tears, saying no, no, no, no, no, over and over again.)_

The man that Liz was chatting up while her son almost drowned was so taken by her motherly concern for her son that he took her out that night. Jess remembers Liz in a sparkly top and heels running around, trying to find her bag. He remembers the two of them coming back to the apartment, drunk, in the early hours and the moans that came from her room. He remembers her happiness the next morning, even though his eyes and sinus' still sting mildly from the chlorine.

_(As he drives back to New York he is struck by the memory of Liz's smiling face. Her unconcealed happiness. It is, Jess thinks, a more overt version of the happiness she used to show when she was dating began each new man. Her smile conflicts with his most recent memory of Rory. Shocked and angry and sad. His hands start to shake as he wonders why his mother deserves her happiness when he gets none.)_

In California, Jess swims everyday. At the beach, where the water is green, he swims out as far as he dares and then lets the waves wash him to shore. They throw him around and he comes up for air with a lungful of water.

_(Jimmy is the deep reaches of the sea that Jess refuses to swim into. He is cool and clear on the surface, but their fights are deep and murky and Jess can never seem to win.)_

He smokes weed on a secluded part of the beach, letting the acrid smell and salt spray consume him. In a haze he builds a sand castle, only to kick the damp sand out of place seconds after finishing. It reminds him of sleigh rides and singers from Iceland made of snow. Instead he writes unpunctuated and disconnected lines of poetry and literature he can only half remember.

When Jimmy finds him in the morning, Jess smells of sour sweat and there is sand imbedded under his fingernails.

The only word that can be read properly causes bile rise in the back of Jess' throat.

_(He carved their initials into a bookshelf once. Rory finds the deep scratches behind a collection of Orwell essays in Andrew's bookshop and isn't sure if she's mortified or pleased. When she calls him over from the Hemingway novels and questions him, he shrugs._

"_We're the only people who read in this town anyway, what's it matter? Anyway, I don't think ol' Eric Arthur Blair will mind."_

"_You shouldn't deface the property of others." She says, before kissing him. She turns from him and he glides his lips across her neck while she runs her fingers along the marks in the wood, smiling.)_

Five weeks after returning to New York he revisits the pool for that summer he was seven. It is an unusually cold day and there is hardly anyone there, just lifeguards, a small family and a diving team practicing in the diving pool. He stands at the edge, at the place where he fell, and looks down. The grey sky has cast a silver shine on the pool, a slick of oil over the surface. When he dives it is warmer than he expected. He comes up for air, just for a moment, before duck-diving back down. The weight of his clothing keeps him near the bottom and he lets all the air out of his lungs, looking up at the sky. He counts in his head and, when he gets to almost two hundred, he forces his way to the top of the water.

_(For the five weeks after Jess returns to the city he is drunk or high or fucking. Sometime, no, a lot of the time, it is all three. He hides himself in a think blanket of booze and grass and sex, letting himself suffocate in it. On the Tuesday of the sixth week he wanders out of whoever's shitty apartment he has woken up in and walks and catches trains and buses without knowledge of his destination. He finds himself buying admittance from a blonde girl in a blue polo shirt in a building that smells of chlorine.)_

Sunshine is reflecting off the pool, the glare blinding him for a moment. He loses focus and takes in a mouthful after mouthful of water until he has reached the side and pulled himself onto the concrete. Lying there, spluttering, he coughs up what seems to him like gallons of blue water.

_(He gets a job in a secondhand bookshop. He gets his own apartment. He doesn't flinch when he stock the Ayn Rand section. And when a girl comes into the shop with brown hair and clear blue eyes he doesn't feel like running away or sleeping with her. He doesn't drown in the blue anymore.)_


End file.
